Envoicing Silent Objects Art and Literature at the Sit of the Canadian Landscape

8/13/2019 Envoicing Silent Objects Art and Literature at the Sit of the Canadian Landscape

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Envoicing Silent Objects 51

ception of place which reminds us constantly that every framed, static view

of a landscape represents a story house, a repository of narratives concern-

ing all those peoples who have inhabited this place, interacted with it, or

claimed it as their own. To this end, I seek first to explore some of the nar-

ratives consigned to this repository, and then to consider how they areaccessed, opened up and reconfigured in one specific literary work: Margaret

Atwoods complex short story Death by Landscape, from her 1991 collection

Wilderness Tips.

Two principles will guide me in my exploration. The first is the notion of

counter-discourse, a term used in postcolonial theory to describe an engage-

ment with a colonialist text by a postcolonial writer. For the postcolonial writer,

a counter-discursive engagement is one that operates within but against the

prevailing discourses of imperialism, an engagement that offers more hope

of success than a simple, binary opposition to discourses as totalizing andwide-ranging as those of imperialism. Operating from within becomes even

more important when challenging something as oblique and subtle as the dis-

courses of apainting. As will become evident, it is imperative for a writer first

to situate heror himself within the frame of the artwork, before s/he can

hope to attempt to engage it in a meaningful conversation. This notion of a

conversation with the silent, atemporal artwork brings me to my second guid-

ing notion, that of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis, a term which I will discuss in more

detail below, refers to the literary description of visual art objects. As we shall

see, the literary technique of ekphrasis is capable of enabling radical critical

engagements with visual modes of imperial representation such as the

landscape painting, lending the artwork a temporal dimension which

liberates it from its frame, and requires it to answer for itself in the discursive

space beyond.

The notion of ekphrasis is necessary in this context because of the

overwhelmingly linguistic focus of postcolonial theories of discourse and count-

er-discourse. Given its poststructuralist roots, it is perhaps unsurprising that

postcolonial theory conceptualizes discourse primarily in terms of the writ-

ten word, a discussion which in practice almost always focuses on the nar-

rative text. Discussions of postcolonial counter-discourse therefore focus on

narrative strategies which see an author occupy one or more sites of the orig-

inal narrative in order to subvert and unsettle its underlying assumptions.

Literary writing back to literary texts involves a struggle between two

contestatory narratives, in what might be seen as a public contest, since

both texts are made available to a general readership. The revisionist text relies

heavily on an assumption that the ideologies of its predecessor are visible, or

at least accessible, to this readership, coded into the textual narrative. The

means by which the text achieves its aesthetic effects, that is to say, is also

the means by which it visibly constructs and transmits ideology. As a resultof counter-discursive contests, the colonial textwhile its status as a work of

art is left undiminishedis displaced from its authoritative position with

respect to colonial discourses. Engagement with the discourses of a visual art


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ception of ekphrasis offers, at least implicitly, the possibility that literary

engagements with the non-literary arts may function to render visible the nar-

rative discourses hidden within a moment of visual representation owing to

this mediums assumed atemporality. The interartistic translation of the

visual into the literary narrativizes the ideological discursive elements codedinto what initially appears to be a purely aesthetic entity, revealing its hith-

erto untapped discursive plenitude. In this important respect, ekphrastic

representation parallels the processes inherent in both critical and creative

postcolonial engagements with colonial discourses. Edward W. Saids con-

ception of a secular critical consciousness, for instance, owes much to the

engagements of Michel Foucault with a modern discourse whose very effec-

tiveness [] is linked to its invisibility.4 The imperative of such engage-

ments, Said suggests, is to make [] discourse appear within [an] invisible

field of dispersion.5

The austere, silent, atemporal plane of the Group of Sevencanvas can, of course, be viewed as just such an invisible field of dispersion,

from which the discourses of imperialism are to be recovered.

The invisibility of the discourses dispersed through and behind the

visual plane of the Groups landscape paintings arises as a result of what I

earlier termed a disjunct between their aesthetic and ideological dimensions.

The paintings considerable success in keeping the unpalatable aspects of their

nationalistic ideology invisible to the public gaze has enabled their wilderness

aesthetic to continue to exert a substantial influence on formulations of

Canadian identity long after the officially sanctioned view of white settlersinherent superiority has given way to a constitutional enshrinement of

multiculturalism. For evidence of the astonishingly enduring legacy of the

Groups particular brand of colonialist landscape art, one need look no

further than the wealth of reproductive prints, calendars and coffee-table books

through which their paintings continue to be disseminated. This sustained

popularity contrasts sharply with the fate accorded to many of the Groups

interlocutors and sympathizers, including the ethnographers and

anthropologists with whom its members were in frequent correspondence.

While these figures shared a great deal of common ideological ground withthe Groups members, however, their works have been vastly less enduring.

Openly expressed in narrative form, their problematically imperialist

underlying assumptions are available for all to see in their works, which has

resulted in the relegation of these texts to little more than historical curiosities.

With the Group of Seven, needless to say, the story has been very different.

This is not to suggest that the narratives underlying their works have not

been exploredas I alluded to earlier, an enormous amount of critical work

has been given over to their vigorous interrogation, but only rarely has this

criticism reached beyond academia and the fairly narrow confines of art-critical circles. The temporal folding of these narratives into a single moment

of representation has ensured that they have remained obscured from large

sections of the public who continue to view them in national terms. Only


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Richard Brock54

relatively recently, at the crucial site of intersection between literature and

visual art, have counter-discursive works such as Atwoods begun to open out

the conversation between the Groups white settler nationalism and the

inclusive self-image of contemporary Canada into what may truly be termed

a public arena.Before going on to discuss Atwoods engagement with the Groups

paintings in detail, I will first attempt to offer an impression of the ideolog-

ical narratives contained within them, along with a reading of the repre-

sentational steps by which these narratives are folded into the spatial plane

of the landscape image. It is, as I suggested earlier, the selective exclusions

performed by the Groups empty wilderness paintings that have drawn the

most stirring anti-imperialist criticism. In a 1994 essay, for example, Scott

Watson went so far as to employ the incendiary term cultural genocide in

reference to the Groups colonialist agenda.6

In Canada as in other settler colo-nial nations, the emptiness of the wildernessthe notion of it as unspoiled,

uninhabited country waiting to be discovered by white settlers, as opposed

to terrain already populated by indigenous peopleshas consistently been

a foundational legitimizing myth supporting settler colonialism. Watson

and others have argued that the Groups landscapes are heavily complicit in

perpetuating this myth, as systems of representation which function to erase

First Nations presence, polity, and, finally, humanity.7 In framing his critique

of the Groups works within a discussion of Allan McEacherns landmark

Supreme Court judgement against First Nations land title claims, Watson attrib-

utes an enduring imaginative legacy to their representations of wilderness.

He traces a lineage between such representations and Judge McEacherns

apparent implication that Indians are a part of nature,8 a selective, ahistorical

assumption which draws on a desire to construct a paradigm of white, male

Canadianness similar to that found in the Groups wilderness aesthetic.

I differ somewhat from many other critics in my conception of the pre-

cise representative strategies via which the Groups landscapes perform these

erasures. The majority of critics who have engaged with their constructions of

Canadas Northern wilderness have tended to view them through the lens of

the agrarian settler myth, in which the virgin lands of the newly-settled nation

are constructed as feminine-gendered vessels of fertility for the exploitation

and sustenance of the masculine-gendered pioneer-settler. While this model

is appropriate to many settler nations, I would suggest that something rather

different happens in the Groups constructions of the Canadian wilderness,

revolving around a central body-landscape conceit which underscores their con-

structions. I shall attempt to unpack the Groups particular version of this con-

ceit by adopting J. Douglas Porteouss notion of the body-landscape metaphor

as a two-way interacting system, whereby landscape is seen as body but also

body is regarded as landscape. 9 The negotiation of the body-landscape rela-tion which forms the core of the Groups wilderness aesthetic may in fact be

viewed in terms of two separate conflicting but simultaneously occurring systems

of representation, each with its own internally consistent scheme of gendering.


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First, the masculine aspect of this complex construction: the rendering

of body as landscape. This trope is usually accomplished in the Groups

works by having the landscape consume the body, often literally. Traces of this

influential aspect of the Groups imaginative strategy are to be found throughout

twentieth century discussions of Canadian nationhood, none more resonantthan Northrop Fryes (in)famous assertion that to enter Canada is a matter

of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.10 The context for this system

of representation is best explored by referring to two key formative events

which occurred before the Group of Seven acquired its name. In 1917, the artist

Tom Thomson, a friend and associate of the artists who would subsequently

form the Group, drowned in Algonquin Park. Thomson, who had been

instrumental in introducing his fellow artists to the rugged North country which

would prove their inspiration, has since been elevated to the status of a

mythic figure, as the very embodiment of the version of masculine Canadianidentity propagated by the Group. As Sherrill Grace suggests,

His symbolic particularity derives from his Canadian-ness, or from what is

repeatedly claimedas his Canadian-nesshis persistent association with the

North, his masculine intimacy with nature [] as measured by his virile com-

mand of canoe, fishing rod, back pack, and camp fire, and his perceived,

uncanny ability to capture the essence of Canada in paint.11

While the Groups notion of Canadianness would incorporate all of

these qualities, however, it is a particular allegorical relation betweenThomsons death and a critical event in the shaping of Canadas national con-

sciousness that is of especial relevance to their imagining of the body as land-

scape. For, while Thomson was being swallowed by his beloved North, thou-

sands of his compatriots were being similarly consumed by what was, for

them, an alien continent: Europe. For the young nation, the barely believ-

able brutality of the First World War brought questions of national identity into

sharper relief than ever before.

The Group were acutely aware of the significance of the Great War to their

own national project. Watson relates how Lawren Harris hoped that theswells of national feeling induced by the long list of casualties could be

redirected to a more creative and magnificent communion than the

communion of war through wilderness images.12 It is in this ideological

climate that the conflation of Thomsons drowning with the deaths of those

on the long list of casualties was to turn him into the Groups own

allegorical war dead. While this has been widely commented on by critics,

however, there remains some uncertainty as to the precise allegorical

function fulfilled by Thomson as war dead. Watson effectively highlights the

potential for contradiction in this construction when he states thatThomsons death in the wild could be contrasted with the carnage of the First

World War. In a way, this solitary death in the wild was on the same continuum

as the deaths in the trenches of Europe.13 Thomsons death, Watson


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seems to suggest, is at once in opposition to, and in parallel with, the

deaths of Canadians in the First World War. The confusion here lies not in

Watsons articulation of the connection between Thomson and the European

war dead; it lies rather in the complex construction by which the pristine,

natural environment of Thomsons death is conflated with the sharplycontrasting man-made desolation of war-torn Europe. This contradiction

can be resolved with reference to the body-as-landscape model, as I shall

attempt to illustrate by examining a 1918 painting by A.Y. Jackson entitled

A Copse, Evening.14

Compositionally, this painting is similar to many of Jacksons other

works: the foreground is dominated by the terrain of the landscape, which

is of indeterminate consistency, offering the possibility that an adventurer

might be able to pass over it unscathed, but equally suggesting that the land

might at any point swallow the unwary traveller. The middle distance is dom-inated by a line of gnarled, twisted trees, beyond which the uninhabited (and

uninhabitable) terrain stretches to the horizon.

What may seem, at first glance, to be the most obvious and banal

statementthat this painting is instantly recognizable as a Jackson canvas,

and bears a considerable resemblance to many of his wilderness images

becomes, on consideration of its context, the most striking. Because this is

not a painting of the Northern wilderness, but of war-torn Europe, where

Jackson served as a soldier before being commissioned to return to the

front line as a war artist. Closer inspection reveals figures in the bottom right-hand corner, walking on a precarious path of planks constructed to prevent

their falling intoand being literally swallowed bythe rancid mud.

These soldier figures troop off into the distance towards a vanishing point on

the horizon, becoming indistinguishable from the distant trees as they do so.

Only the searchlight beams give any clue as to the existence of a human

enemy (though even these seem to emanate from an indeterminate location);

the enemy explicitly identified here is the hostile landscape. The constant

threat posed to the body by the landscape constructs the environment as mas-

culine and warlike, a force which will consume any humans who do not matchit in combat. It is deeply significant, therefore, that Jacksons system of

representation apparently makes no qualitative distinction between this

environment and the Canadian wilderness. They are ultimately not opposi-

tional but parallel constructions of environment, and it is this which allows

for the allegorical conflation of Tom Thomson and the Canadian war dead.

The erasure of First Nations peoples performed by the Groups landscape

paintings, then, stems ultimately from their conception of the Northern

wilderness as equal and opposite to their own combative model of

Canadianness. The wilderness is empty of native peoples because they areOther to the Groups white male national paradigm, and are therefore sys-

tematically erased from (and by implication by) the landscape. In this for-

mulation, however, the wilderness must be empty of all those who are Other

Richard Brock56


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to this paradigm of Canadianness, meaning that traces not only of native but

also feminine presence must be removed. If, as Watson suggests, the white-

ness of the wilderness is mapped directly onto the desire for a paradigm of

all-white Canadianness, it follows that its maleness is also a mirror image

of the masculine Canadian ideal. This forms an important strand of the gen-der problematics of the Group of Sevens vision, which is often obscured from

critical view by the assumption that the wilderness is imagined as feminine.

In depicting the wilderness as entirely absent of human figures, the Groups

artists ensured that what remained would be a mirror image of (their per-

ceptions of) themselves and the nation: rugged, combative and masculine.

Hence the problematic inherent in this aspect of the Groups construction of

Wilderness is not the feminization of the land itself, but the erasure and con-

sumption of the feminine by a masculine-gendered environment.

But what of the bodies that were not consumed? The Groups aestheticof wilderness drew its power from the vast expanses of emptiness their paint-

ings depicted, yet if they were to differentiate themselves from those whom

the wilderness had consumedto demonstrate that they had pitted them-

selves against its power and survivedtheir own presence at the site of

encounter needed to be documented. While he does not frame it in these

combative terms, Jonathan Bordo identifies in the work of the Group and Tom

Thomson a tension between the aesthetic desire to deny human presence in

the wilderness on the one hand and the having been there but also the hav-

ing to be there in order to record as work ones being there on the other.15

A resultant feature of many of the paintings, Bordo argues, is the presence of

a subjective trace in the form of a symbolic deposit, most often realized in

the anthropomorphic form of a foregrounded solitary tree.

In the anthropomorphism of such a construct, the aesthetic necessity to

refrain from representing the body directly is circumvented by a landscape-

as-body construction, in what I suggest is the second, parallel system of rep-

resentation in operation in the Groups wilderness images. The subjective trace

of the white, male artist is a very different construction from those dis-

cussed earlier, in which bodies are consumed by the environment, leaving notrace. Here, the body asserts its dominance over the surrounding landscape,

proclaiming itself as a powerful, irreducible, and, crucially, masculine entity.

For the subjective trace is not merely anthropomorphic, but phallocentric.

Having constructed the wilderness environment as masculine, the artist

proceeds, by asserting his own presence within it, to emasculate it. Thus the

wilderness is simultaneously conceptualizedas wild, untamed and masculine

and transformedinto a space that is feminine, passive and domesticated. In

this way, the complex bidirectional associations between the body and

landscape in the Group of Sevens works are able to account both for the prob-lematic erasures upon which their cold, austere, silent worlds are built, and

for the many apparent contradictions in their constructions of, and attitudes

to, the wilderness.



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Richard Brock60

with such modes. Such sites of interartistic engagement between the literary

and the visual form powerful loci in which the aesthetic and the ideological

may be reconciled, allowing the discourses surrounding such non-narra-

tive modes of imperial representation as the landscape painting to emerge

into a contestable space. To read a work such as Death by Landscape, then,is to be propelled beyond the frame of the silent, static landscape painting and

into the lived space beyonda space not just of conquest but of contest; a

space constantly in flux, perpetually reframing its views and rewriting its sto-

ries. To occupy this site of intersection, where art and literature vie with each

other to tell us the truth about the world we inhabit, is perhaps ultimately only

to be reminded of the fragmentary nature of representation. It is here, final-

ly, that we are confronted by the realization that reading and seeing are at best

partial ways of knowing place, ways of knowing which may make sense only

within an interdisciplinary matrix where they are free to collide, overlap andengage each other in dialogue.

Notes

1 Many of the central critical texts concerning the Group of Sevens imagina-

tive legacy (including works by several authors whom I reference here) are

now available in excerpted form in the collectionBeyond Wilderness: The

Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art, edited by John

OBrian and Peter White (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens UniversityPress, 2007).

2 W.J.T. Mitchell, Imperial Landscape, In Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T.

Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 10.3 James A.W. Heffernan, Ekphrasis and Representation, New Literary History

22, no. 2 (1991): 31-2.4 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1983), 219.5 Ibid., 219.

6 Scott Watson, Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of ModernCanadian Landscape Painting, Semiotext(e) 6, no. 2 (1994), 94.

7 Ibid., 94.8 Ibid., 93.9 J. Douglas Porteous, Bodyscape: The Body-Landscape Metaphor,. The

Canadian Geographer 30, no. 1 (1986): 2.10 Northrop Frye, Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada. In The Bush

Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1995), 219.11 Sherrill E. Grace, Inventing Tom Thomson: From Biographical Fictions to

Fictional Autobiographies and Reproductions (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2004), 9-10.

12 Scott Watson, Race, Wilderness, Territory, 100.


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13 Scott Watson, Disfigured Nature: The Origins of the Modern Canadian

Landscape, InEye of Nature, ed. Dana Augaitis and Helga Pakasaar (Banff:

Walter Phillips Gallery, 1991), 104-5, my emphasis.14 Oil on canvas, 86.9 cm x 112.2 cm. The painting is in the collection of the

Canadian War Museum, and can be viewed online at http://collections.civ-ilization.ca/public/objects/common/webmedia.php?irn=1078585.

15 Jonathan Bordo, Jack Pine Wilderness Sublime Or the Erasure of the

Aboriginal Presence from the Landscape,Journal of Canadian Studies 27,

no. 4 (1992): 117.16 Margaret Atwood, Death by Landscape, In Wilderness Tips (Toronto:

McLelland & Stewart, 1991) 110.17 Ibid., 110.18 Ibid., 118.19

Ibid., 128-129.

References

Atwood, Margaret. 1991. Death by Landscape. In Wilderness Tips, 107-129. Toronto:

McLelland & Stewart.

Bordo, Jonathan. 1992. Jack PineWilderness Sublime Or the Erasure of the Aboriginal

Presence from the Landscape.Journal of Canadian Studies 27, no. 4: 98-128.

Frye, Northrop. 1995. Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada. In The Bush Garden:

Essays on the Canadian Imagination, 209-253. Concord, ON: Anansi.

Grace, Sherrill E. 2004. Inventing Tom Thomson: From Biographical Fictions to Fictional

Autobiographies and Reproductions. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press.

Heffernan, James A.W. 1991. Ekphrasis and Representation. New Literary History 22, no.

2: 297-316.

Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Imperial Landscape. In Landscape and Power, edited by W.J.T.

Mitchell, 5-34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Porteous, J. Douglas. 1986. Bodyscape: The Body-Landscape Metaphor. The Canadian

Geographer 30, no. 1: 2-12.

Said, Edward W. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Watson, Scott. 1991. Disfigured Nature: The Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape.

InEye of Nature, edited by Dana Augaitis and Helga Pakasaar, 103-112. Banff: Walter

Phillips Gallery.

_______. 1994. Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of Modern Canadian

Landscape Painting. Semiotext(e) 6, no. 2: 93-104.


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Envoicing Silent Objects Art and Literature at the Sit of the Canadian Landscape